A calibrated BISG for inferring race from surname and geolocation
Applications
2025-06-11 v4 Methodology
Abstract
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is a ubiquitous tool for predicting race and ethnicity using an individual's geolocation and surname. Here we demonstrate that statistical dependence of surname and geolocation within racial/ethnic categories in the United States results in biases for minority subpopulations, and we introduce a raking-based improvement. Our method augments the data used by BISG--distributions of race by geolocation and race by surname--with the distribution of surname by geolocation obtained from state voter files. We validate our algorithm on state voter registration lists that contain self-identified race/ethnicity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2304.09126,
title = {A calibrated BISG for inferring race from surname and geolocation},
author = {Philip Greengard and Andrew Gelman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.09126},
year = {2025}
}